“Possibly from a vehicle following the target vehicle.”

“Hmm. Interesting. But what point are you making?”

“I don’t know. Maybe none. But the case keeps coming to mind. It came to mind immediately when you told your story about the shooting in the alley. I know a psychologist who talks about something called pattern resonance—how things remind us of other things because they share a structural similarity. And this can occur without our conscious knowledge of what the similarity is.”

Beyond a barely audible “Hmm,” she didn’t respond.

He felt uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. He didn’t mind sharing his ideas, concerns, hypotheses. He was a lot less comfortable sharing his confusion, his failure to grasp some connection he hoped might be present.

When she finally did speak, her voice was tentative. “I guess I can see what you’re saying. Let me sleep on it, okay?”

Chapter 53

A Terrible Calm

The feeling that he’d dumped his quandary unfairly in Esti’s lap was still with him that evening. Finding significant patterns in situations and relating one to another was supposedly his strength.

The sun had set, and colors were fading from the hills and fields around the house. It was past dinnertime, but he had no appetite. He made himself a cup of coffee and drank it black, his only concession to his need for nourishment being the addition of an extra spoonful of sugar.

Perhaps he’d been staring too hard, too directly, at the problem. Perhaps it was another example of the dim-star phenomenon, which he’d discovered one night lying in a hammock gazing up at the sky. There are some stars so distant that their faint pinpricks of light will not register at the center of the retina, which by some slight measure is less sensitive than the rest of the retinal surface. The only way to see one of these stars is to look several degrees to one side of it or the other. To direct scrutiny the star is invisible. But look away, and there it is.

A frustrating puzzle was often like that. Let go of it for a bit and the answer might suddenly appear. A name or a word one was struggling to remember might surface only when the struggle had been abandoned. He knew all this, but his tenacity—Madeleine called it stubbornness—made it difficult for him to put anything aside.

Sometimes the decision was made for him by simple exhaustion. Or by an external intervention, like getting a phone call—which is what happened now.

The call was from Kyle.

“Hey, Dad, how’s everything?”

“Fine. Are you still up in Syracuse?”